Gwangju in Stitch

We finished our one year contract teaching English in South Korea. Now we are living on Cat Ba Island in Halong Bay, Vietnam. Matt is a rock climbing guide for SloPony (www.slopony.com) and I'm teaching a bit of English here.

Sunday, August 30, 2009

Some of you may be curious about what we'll be doing for the next few months before we make our return to the homeland just before Thanksgiving. This is the rough outline:

I'm going to leave Cat Ba in the middle of September and head off to the Yunnan province in southern China on my own. Matt is going to finish September on Cat Ba trying to squeeze in as much climbing as he can. His friends, Gregg, from home is also coming to Vietnam to climb with him. I'll let them climb their faces off, while I explore a bit of China.

I'll meet back up with Matt (and maybe Gregg) during the first week of October back in Vietnam. We're going to make a fairly quick exit for Laos for about two weeks, then back into central (Hue and Hoi An) and southern (Saigon and the Mekong Delta) Vietnam for a bit. Then we'll cross into Cambodia to Phnom Penh and to Siem Reap to see Angkor Wat. Then, last stop Thailand, we'll fly out of Bangkok and we'll leave tropical, steamy, fruity and spicy south east Asia for sweaters and pumpkin pie on the east coast of America!

Tuesday, August 4, 2009

This past weekend, we headed up to Hanoi for a few days. I basically wanted to get off the island for a few days to do a little sight seeing, shopping, and soaking up a little city life.

On Friday night, we went to a concert. We heard "the world's best beat boxer" was playing that night and decided we couldn't pass up a chance to see the world's best beat boxer, so we went. It was our first hip hop show and was pretty fun. I'm not convinced that Killa Kela is the best beat boxer in the world, but entertaining none the less. There was also a sweet break dancing dance off between two teams of boys from Hanoi.

Here's a video of some beat boxing, he's making all the sounds with his mouth.

Our hotel was on a little alley street in the Old Quarter. The street was a little bustling market in the morning, but very quiet at night.

On Saturday morning, we went to the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum. They keep Ho Chi Minh's body preserved and mummified in this shrine. It's pretty bizarre. You must silently and respectfully shuffle around the mausoleum in a line. You cannot take your camera inside. The mausoleum is chilled and dark and only open three hours a day. Imagine if you could go see Jefferson, Lincoln, or Kennedy or any or all of our president's bodies preserved for the public to revere. It's a very somber visit for the Vietnamese, but for foreign visitors it's so bizarre to us, it's almost like a side show. Ho Chi Minh wanted to be cremated and have his ashes spread across Vietnam, but those in charge after his death created this giant spectacle against his wishes.

Inside the Ho Chi Minh museum.

This is the one pillar pagoda, which is very near to the mausoleum. It's special because it's on one pillar!

Then we hit the next big tourist spot in Hanoi, the Temple of Literature. It is a temple dedicated to higher learning and where many Confucius scholars studied.

Then we did a walking tour of the Old Quarter. It was originally the merchants quarter with each street selling a different type of goods, from an herb street to a towel and tin box street. Now, the Old Quarter is the main district for travelers. There are many hotels and restaurants catering to foreigners.

There isn't actually too much to do in Hanoi besides drop money! There are plenty of shops and nice restaurants. We splurged on a few meals while in Hanoi (meaning we spent $15-20 on a meal for two rather than the $5-10 we usually spend in Cat Ba). I bought a new dress since the only dress I brought here got lost in the first week when our laundry disappeared from our hotel's laundry services. Matt picked up a few new books. We sought out a movie theater and enjoyed a movie resting in the cold air conditioning after a lot of walking around town.

Below is Matt whining about being hot and tired. "Aaaashley, my feet hurt, I'm tired, I'm sweating through my shirt..... don't take a picture of me!" Also, his beard is getting ridiculous. I threaten to cut it at night.

Tuesday, July 21, 2009

As a few of our friends from Gwangju contracts were up, they stopped by Cat Ba and Halong Bay on the beginning of their journeys through Southeast Asia. Caitlin and Justin were the first to arrive and we rented a boat for a day and a night to cruise around Halong Bay.Justin tries his hand (s and feet!) at deep water soloing.

It's feeding time at the floating fish farm.

Kelly arrives after a storm delay and a detour to the north. We are rad on motorbikes. I kind of want one when I get home.

Enjoying some afternoon bia hoi and Justin cleans the mud off Caitlin's leg by spitting water on it.

On Saturday, we went Lien Minh, a village on the island where a lot of the climbing is located. We didn't get to climb long before we got shut down because the cliff is in the middle of lease negotiations. We spent the rest of the day lying in hammocks and trying to slackline.

This boy was very enthusiastic about having his picture taken and taking our cameras to try his hand at a bit of photography. I now have many photos of this water buffalo and his friend.

Trang's family was visiting Cat Ba from Hue. We were really lucky to be invited to a big dinner in Lien Minh with Slo Pony folks and all the people that help them here. Trinh and Nha facilitate climbers at Butterfly Valley. I teach their son, Tuan. Also, Quang and his wife. Quang is a very important man around Cat Ba and owns the boats Slo Pony uses for their bay trips. This dinner involved a food and a lot of homemade honey rice wine!

This is Dinh and Vu. They are Trang's younger brothers and Slo Pony rock climbing guides. I'm teaching them English and I just love them! They're really great guys and super cool, just look at Dinh's hair. (He's only 20, but I just found out he was a hair stylist before getting into rock climbing.)

The honey rice wine was flowing and Trinh and Slo couldn't help from dancing!

Caitlin is getting a Vietnamese lesson from Tuan, also a really great young man that I'm teaching as well.

This is Trang, Dinh, and Vu's youngest brother, Vinh. He is the cutest (and sneakiest) thing ever. Whenever my back was turned, my rice wine glass was suddenly full again. Usually, I want to steal children under three or four years old, but I would steal him.

Here's a group shot of our extended Vietnamese family dinner. It was really a great night and I'm glad our Korea friends got a chance to share it with us!

Last weekend, we were rained in all day and cabin fever set in hard. All the boats on and off the island were cancelled, which delayed our Korea friends a few days, but more on their visit later. They tell me that this past storm was hardly a storm at all, but it look like a whole lot of rain to me!

This was the bottom of the main street after the rain stopped. There was a huge pile of rocks from the steady stream of water running downhill to the harbor.

This isn't a very good picture, but where the water changes color is the line between where the water is brown from all the dirt runoff coming downhill and the regular water.

Brian's motorbike got a bit too soaked to start up again and instantly had a team of Vietnamese amateur motorbike mechanics. I believe they broke it while trying to fix it, fixed what they broke, then, in true Vietnamese style, asked Brian to pay them for fixing what they broke .

A few of the girls who work at the Noble House.

This is Llet (sounds like "let" with a long l and a hard t). She is the sassiest of Noble House girls. She is always hitting Matt and telling him his beard makes him look like a monkey. I'm pretending that she is tormenting me because she usually is. Here we are having a cabin fever photo shoot in the kitchen.

I'm pretty sure we will be rained in many more days before the summer is through.

Sunday, July 12, 2009

This is the giant neon arch in the center of town. Why an island that isn't exactly affluent spent a quarter of a million dollars on this neon monster, I don't know.

This is my classroom at the National Park.

Kayaking in a Slo Pony kayak.

I had to cajole Matt into letting me use his dry bag so I could bring my camera in the kayak. He doesn't like to let go of his dry bag.

Sometimes, it just rains.....

The view from the watchtower in the National Park.

The scary, rusty watchtower in the National Park.

Very very sweaty from hiking.

This is the entrance to Hospital Cave. It's a Vietnamese secret hospital they used during the American War (as they call it here, we know it as the Vietnam War). It's three stories inside a natural cave. I don't have any good pictures from the inside because it was so dark, but it was mainly empty concrete rooms.

This is a very tiny kitten that belongs to Trang, Erik's wife.

Vietnamese tourists. The beaches are beautifully quiet before 3:30pm, then the Vietnamese come out in force when the sun is a bit less fierce.

Sunday, July 5, 2009

This is a time lapse video that I shot from the roof of our hotel. It's about 30 minutes condensed into about a minute and a half. This harbor is where many of the tourists on the island board their Halong bay cruises and is quite bustling in the morning! The littlest boats are actually the loudest and start waking us up around 5:30am.

Saturday, June 20, 2009

I have been a bit lax with updating this blog. I don't always have the Internet right in front of my face here!

Since my last update, we have been settling into our jobs and lives here. Matt has started guiding and working in the office for Slopony and I started both of my teaching gigs last week. Teaching here is incredibly different than in Korea. Here I'm totally on my own, which is both a relief and a challenge.

I started teaching my classes at the National Park last week. I went on Monday afternoon for a meeting to organize the group of 34 students into three classes. However, it seems there was some sort of party celebrating rangers visiting from another National Park. About half of my students were too drunk to show up! We organized the classes anyway, but now they are being reorganized because apparently drunk organizers don't organize classes well!

The National Park classes got off to a rocky start last week. Most of them have a very low English level. I have been telling them that we don't need a translator, but one of my classes went and retrieved one during the break. There seems to be several sets of expectations about what will be happening with English lessons at the National Park, which is difficult to balance. Our main goal is to improve their pronunciation so we are using simple vocabulary. Many already know these words, so they think it is not helpful and they are bored. I'm trying to get them to understand that if no one can understand you, it doesn't matter how many words you know! This coming week should be better as the classes are being rearranged by level. I go there three afternoons a week and meet each group for about 2.5 hours.

My other English teaching post here is to work with the Vietnamese staff of Slopony. They are the wife of one of the owners and two of her younger brothers who help belay and guide on trips. I'm also supposed to teach the son of the farmer who owns the cliff with most of the climbing on the island. He didn't come to the first lesson because he was sick, but I think he's worred he can't afford the lessons. I need to tell him that I don't really want any money from him. He's a sweet, smart kid from a poor farming family and I really couldn't take any money from him. He leads trekking trips for SloPony sometimes. They are all really nice and sweet. Two of the boys are about 20 and the younger brother is about 18. We have lessons three times a week also, but I see them all the time so I'm trying to verbally quiz them everytime I see them. If they can speak English, at least conversationally, they will have much better opportunities living on a tourist island. I think I 'll see a lot more improvement with this group.

In other news, I learned to drive the motorbike this week! It was the first step on my list of things to become badass. I can now drive myself all over the island. Also, I have somehow managed to catch a sneezy, snotty, sore throat cold in tropical conditions! I haven't been taking many pictures, but I'll pick up the slack on that too.